Book Review Anusual

What goes around comes around.

Starting from Social work in Delhi, Anu Aggarwal’s journey to tinsel town in Mumbai in the late 1980 saw her rise to stardom and super model quite by chance.

In 1990, she became a rave across India and the world - Aashiqui, 1990, with Mahesh Bhatt as Director, turned her into the heart’s desire, both for men, and women. Her nubile body, damsel-in-distress looks pulled the heart strings in every heart and sooner than later, Anu Aggarwal became the actress made to travel across the globe with her stardom. And suddenly from the name on everyone’s lips, she was lost in oblivion. From who’s that girl, she became, where’s that girl? And then people stopped to ask about her any more.

But the famous in the world, don’t make a quiet retreat. Suddenly, out of the blue, she came back from the dead. Indeed, the word dead here, is for real. In a near fatal accident, Anu Aggarwal almost lost her life, breathing in coma for nearly a month! She had multiple fractures when she came to and after many months of healing and repair, she is back again, this time with a Book.

Anusual – Memoir of a Girl Who Came Back from the Dead recounts her life from Delhi as a Social Worker to becoming a glamour super model in Mumbai to becoming a super star in Bollywood, followed by Hollywood and French films too. But it is not only the story of a celebrity film star of the ‘90s, but what does take the reader by surprise is Anu Aggarwal’s engagement with the spiritual. Giving up a life of fame, fags, faqs and fans, she dissolved into a life of absolute abstinence, strict discipline by taking up Yoga at a more than rigorous Ashram in the Himalayas. She spent many years there and then returned to Mumbai, only to be wrecked by an accident that nearly took her life. She emerged from there and went back to where she began – a life working with the less fortunate in the slums of Mumbai, teaching Yoga to a vast many.

What goes around comes around.

The book is written in a matter-of-fact manner with an ample dose of what she was most desired for by both men and women alike, her sensuality and lost looks of a little child, the innocence in her eyes, that drove men and women to fantacise about her; indeed, there is an overdose of sex with men in her book. It carefully conceals what many believe she was a lover of women too.

I have had my doubt too and I wondered if her over engagement with the male gender is her own way to prove to herself that she is not attracted to same sex.

But this, only the reader will know once they read what is concealed within the pages. 

Anusual—Memoir Of A Girl Who Came Back From The Dead: HarperCollins India, 192 pages, Rs 299